Smells Bad, Tastes Good

Several years ago, my family had to go to Thailand for a board meeting for a ministry that serves Asia.  We had a great time in that special country.  It was one of the trips that we will remember fondly forever, and the hotel where we stayed was an interesting part of those memories!  Back in its day, this place must have been spectacular.  There was so much carved wood everywhere we looked!  There were plenty of flowers - orchids, in fact - growing all over the gigantic lobby.  The rooms, though, looked like they had not been seen by management in 30 plus years.  But how much time do we really stay in a hotel room when visiting an exotic country, anyway, right? 

People who stayed in this hotel could bring in any food whatsoever that they liked....except...durian! 

The forbidden fruit.... There was a market outside of the hotel that sold pretty much anything that you could ever find in Thailand, and there was a fruit vendor there who was selling this large and unattractive fruit.  Yep.  It gave off a pretty fowl odor, but the vendor said (and I quote), "Smell like Hell. Taste like Heaven."  His mighty fine English said it all.  This weird fruit smells a bit like a port-o-john.  It's that strong, but it does have a strange almost cheese, almost fruit kind of taste that is pleasant enough.  I wouldn't call it heaven, exactly, but I'm not Thai. 

Maggie always asks, "Why do the things that are good for you taste so bad when the things that are bad for you taste so good?"  Well, why?  I don't know.  It's not always the case, but there are certain greens and possibly a rutabega or two that I know would be good for me, but I just don't want to taste them.  While that piece of chocolate and peanut butter fudge that I would love to eat just might be my undoing.  Thankfully, we have access to a nutritional value run-down on everything these days.  We aren't really kept in the dark, but no one posts signs telling us what is right or wrong, either.

Teenagers and rising adults sometimes have an almost disabled sense of right and wrong.  Not disabled, exactly, but at least desensitized.  I remember my younger years and cringe when I think of the truly stupid choices that I made.  So many of the things that I decided to do seemed like a good idea in the moment, but I knew better.  There's no polite way to say it: I was a fool for many of those precious years.  It wasn't that I didn't have access to a good values code.  It's really that I ignored the wisdom that my parents had been spoon feeding me for so long.  There just comes a time when we have to take that wisdom, ingest it and claim it as our own, but that doesn't mean that parents simply can overlook their children's unwise thought patterns.  We give them all that we can that is godly and good, but there comes a time when parents must begin to step back slowly and give their children a little more space to try out their own decision-making skills.  I made so many mistakes.  All of my friends did, too.  In fact, I haven't seen but a handful of teenagers who didn't trip terribly along the way.  The truth is, though, that almost all of the kids who have been raised well grow up to be wonderful adults, regardless of the foolish choices made.  This must have been true back in King Solomon's time, as well, because he felt it necessary to record a bit of wisdom on this: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is older, he won't depart from it." Proverbs 22:6 

With a teenager in the house and another quickly following, I know that I will come to lean heavily on the assurance that God certainly will take over when I drop the reins in my children's lives.  They'll probably do a few things that carry bad "smells"...They may even look half rotten on the outside from time to time.  But I'm sure that the results will be heavenly when it's all said and done!  "Smell like Hell. Taste like Heaven." I'll just bet that my own parents can relate to that sentiment in my life!  I turned out OK, but, boy,  was I ever rotten in those in-between years!